Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced Wednesday he has launched an investigation into five Big Tech companies for allegedly censoring conservative content.
The statement from Rokita’s office said that the investigation centered around whether the companies “have potentially harmed Indiana consumers through business practices that are abusive, deceptive and/or unfair.”
“In particular, Attorney General Rokita is probing methods by which the companies have limited consumers’ access to certain content — often deleting or obscuring posted material reflecting a politically conservative point of view,” the statement said. “Such manipulation prevents consumers from making informed choices.”
“In a free society, few assets are more important to consumers than access to information and the opportunity to express political viewpoints in meaningful forums,” Rokita said. “It is potentially harmful and unfair for these companies to manipulate content in ways they do not publicly discuss or that consumers do not fully understand.”
Rokita is also probing alleged actions taken by attorney Vanita Gupta, a far-left activist that President Joe Biden has nominated to be associate attorney general at the Department of Justice, to “encourage the companies to censor conservative viewpoints.” The five companies that Rokita is probing include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
The statement said that Gupta “has allegedly met with Facebook and Twitter executives to urge ‘more rigorous rules and enforcement,’ to use her own words as quoted in Time.”
“Gupta, according to the Time article, stressed that it was important for social media platforms to be ‘tagging things and taking them down,’” the statement added.
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